The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.-Mark Twain

Current Project: Incident Management Development and TrainingSpecial Region Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Last year in Indonesia a total of 377 people were killed or disappeared due to natural disasters in Indonesia. Additionally, 1,005 more people were injured, and 3,494,319 people were displaced or suffered in some other way from a disaster. These are not isolated events. The year before, over 500 casualties were recorded. And since the 1990’s hundreds of thousands have died in natural disasters plaguing Indonesia. By far the most common and destructive natural disaster effecting Indonesians are landslides. In the Special Region Yogyakarta, a small area made up of several regencies on the island of Java, all together about the size of Mason County, there were over a thousand landslides, and in that region alone, 122 people died. Approximately a third of the 2017 natural disaster deaths in Indonesia occurred in the Special Region Yogyakarta.

Empact Northwest is a 501 (c) 3 International nonprofit organization providing disaster response and community based disaster preparedness education to under-served communities across the globe. We have developed a project to partner with the Special Region Yogyakarta Emergency Response Officials, providing much needed training in Emergency Management and the Incident Command System (ICS) to help them develop their ICS and Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) program. We believe through this partnership between our organizations, the Emergency Management Officials in Yogyakarta will dramatically reduce the deaths and injuries due to natural disaster.

In January 2019, a small group of Empact Northwest leadership will deploy to Yogyakarta Indonesia to meet with Emergency personnel and conduct research pertinent to the project’s success. We have maintained contact with the Yogyakarta Emergency agency leadership who are requesting and supporting our project. By the end of our deployment in January, we hope to have any information we need to provide the best training possible for the Yogyakarta Emergency Management Agency. We will deploy again at the end of the year in 2019 to conduct the training. Although we will be doing our best to make them experts in the field of Incident Command and Emergency Management, we intend for this to be just as educational to our organization as well. We hope this project will foster relationships and diplomacy between not only Empact Northwest and the Yogyakarta Emergency Agency, but also between the United States and Indonesia.